This summer, ombre is unleashing a gradual explosion of intense colors onto eyes, lips and
nails.

Ombre means “shaded” or “shadow” in French. In modern fashion and home decor, though, it
describes the subtle transition from one color to another.

Sometimes the hues rest next to one another on the color wheel: A pearly pink blurs into fuchsia
that melts into a candy-apple red.

Other times, the colors aren’t related at all — as when turquoise makes a transition into
tangerine.

You can probably picture the colors flowing through a maxi dress, but does this really work with
makeup? After all, there was once an unbreakable rule about bland lips with bold eyes.

Nonetheless, such color trends are making fashion this year the brightest it has been in
decades:
• Skinny jeans are purple.
• Bags are banana yellow.
• Ballerina flats are kelly green.

To complement all these monochromatics, high-fashion faces are featuring, in bold colors, ombre
eyes and lips. “The people who are going bold dare to go bold,” said Chhor Tim, a makeup artist at
Couture Hair Studio in Philadelphia, who worked a lot of ombre eyes on her clients during the prom
season.“They don’t care. It’s exciting to be extreme.”

These days, fantastical fashion is typically traced to Lady Gaga. Credit the singer’s makeup
artist, Tara Savelo, with being among the first to suggest that so many bright features on one face
could go mainstream.

Smoky-green eyes paired with purple lips started to show up on fashion models in the September
magazines — a way to amp up the simple silhouettes on the verge of going bright.

By springtime, ombre techniques in makeup became so hot, Tim said, that ordinary women were
requesting multicolored lips to go with their multicolored hair. Eye makeup has artists layering
color upon color on lids. And, he said, “We are seeing ombre in leopard and zebra prints.”

Before the hue became synonymous with all things two-toned, it referred to the name of a dyeing
technique developed in the 1840s. It became common in fashion in the 1920s, during the flapper era,
said Clare Sauro, curator of Drexel University’s historic costume collection, when silhouettes
became straighter and ornamentation was replaced with the ombre techniques. Back then, though, the
graduated colors focused on quieter shades of blues or tans.

The techniques were as much about texture and shine as they were about color, Sauro said.

The swirling of shades became fashionable again in the 1960s and ’70s as tie-dyed clothes
morphed into styles.

The trend hit makeup in the 1980s with the punk movement. Cyndi Lauper wasn’t afraid of yellow
lips; Boy George’s were gray in the center and edged in black.But punk rock was scary, and
mainstream fashion wasn’t hearing it. Back then, a red lip and a smoky eye proved enough to be
scandalous.

The present-day era of do-it-yourself fashion — there are a gang of instructional ombre videos
on YouTube — combined with society’s heightened sense of individual style makes this a perfect time
for the return of ombre in everything, said Sauro, not to mention the current worship of all things
1920s.